OUR FULTONS
All the world's Fultons can be traced to a Norman family
called de Fultowne that entered Britain with William the
Conqueror or shortly after and settled in Ayrshire, today's Strathclyde,
Scotland. A Thomas de Fultowne is recorded living in a manor in Ayrshire in
1220. The name evolved to Fowlton and to Fulton.
Our family traces its Fulton roots
directly to Reverend Doctor Robert
Fulton who is known to history as the chaplain to Lady Arabella Stuart. The
said Lady was at the time, 1614, imprisoned in the Tower of London for the
crime of marrying William Seymour, later Marquess of Hartford, without royal
approval. The Lady died in the Tower in 1615 and the Reverend Robert
subsequently moved to a farm called Belsize
located on Seymour lands at Lisburn in County Antrim, Ireland.
Members of the Reverend Doctor
Robert’s Scottish-born family are believed to have settled at Lisburn as early
as 1611, when the town was still called Lisnagarvy. It was renamed following
its destruction during an Irish Catholic uprising in 1641. Lisburn would be
burnt at least twice more during wars and once by accident. (The IRA was still
exploding bombs there in 1997.)
One of the Reverend Doctor
Robert's descendants emigrated about 1700 to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania,
thereby initiating a branch of the family of which Robert Fulton, the inventor of the steamboat, is a notable member.
After the death of the Reverend
Doctor Robert's great-grandson, James, in the defence of the Protestant
stronghold of Londonderry in 1689, James' wife, Eliza, took her two children,
John and Mary, to a farm called Drumcrowie,
near Malin, in the northwest corner of Ireland.
Many descendants of these Fultons
(who were Presbyterians and Methodists) immigrated to Colchester County, that
part of Nova Scotia that centres on Truro. The earliest Fultons from Ireland,
John, born 1728, and James, born 1726, may be from this family. What is
confirmed is that the five sons and one daughter of John Fulton, born 1713, emigrated in waves beginning in the 1760s
and ending in 1820. Francis Fulton,
born in Malin in 1753, led the final wave, accompanied by his wife Mary Boggs, thought to have been born
in Ireland, son John Fulton, born in
Malin in 1791, and John's wife, who was his first cousin, Sarah Crawford, born in Donegal in 1797.
The Fulton Bible
Francis Fulton brought a Bible from Ireland that had been printed in Edinburgh in
1808. At the time of Francis’ arrival in Nova Scotia an accident in a small
boat caused the Bible to be soaked with water. It was nevertheless used for
many years as a family register of births, deaths and marriages. The Bible has
been handed down father to son ever since, in the possession in turn of John
Fulton, Robert Starritt Fulton, Joshua Merle Fulton -- who brought it west to
Manitoba and British Columbia – and finally Clarence Fulton of Campbell River.
Clarence plans to donate it to a museum. Francis also brought a plough from
Ireland, which has been placed in a museum at Armstrong, BC.
John Fulton and Sarah Crawford had five children. One was Robert Starritt Fulton, born in Nova
Scotia in 1831. A farmer, he lived at Castlereagh, NS until about 1900 and then
at Onslow, NS. In 1895 he rode on the first Pole Railway that ran ten miles
from Silica Lake near Castlereagh to a wharf at Bass River, and wrote an
amusing poem about the line. His son Francis died while working on the railway
the same year. Robert is buried at Castlereagh in a cemetery across the road
from his former property.
The Fulton and Starritt families were joined by a marriage in Ireland. Both families then immigrated to Nova Scotia where they intermarried several more times. Not surprisingly, Fulton appears as a Christian name in the Starritt family and vice versa.
Robert Starritt Fulton married Rebecca Jane Holmes in 1864. One of Robert and Rebecca's 12
children, Sarah Naomi Fulton, born
in 1879, took care of her widowed father for some years. After his death Sarah
Naomi went to Boston where she had relatives and where for some months she
studied dressmaking. In 1907 she travelled across America to visit her brother
John who lived in Steveston, BC. She met Joseph
Beshara Haddad, a jeweller, while riding the British Columbia Electric
Railway tram that ran in those days from Vancouver to Steveston. Sarah Naomi
then travelled to the home of another brother in Comox, BC, where she fell ill.
Joseph Haddad followed her there. That same year, having recovered her health,
Sarah Naomi married Joseph in her brother’s house in Steveston. The couple
subsequently lived in the towns of Upper Nicola, Mission, Ashcroft and,
principally, Merritt, BC.
Several related Fultons found their way to British
Columbia during the same period and found work in forestry. Others established
farms in southern Manitoba and at Armstrong, BC.
One of Sarah Naomi’s many accomplishments was the writing
of poetry. She sometimes quoted from her own work from memory, and recited
poems of her father verbatim.
One of Joseph and Naomi's five
children, Freda Evangeline Haddad,
married William Dewar in Merritt, BC
in 1928. William and Freda's daughter, Gloria
Catherine Dewar, married Robert
Harold Murphy in Victoria, BC in 1952.
The Fulton family history contains the names of 5,328
(mainly Canadian) descendants of the original Reverend Doctor Robert, a list
that even at the time of publishing, 1979, was by no means complete.
Sources: The
Fulton Family of Atlantic Canada by Fulton Family Associates, Truro,
NS, 1979; Memoirs of the Fultons of Lisburn, by Sir Theodore Hope, 1903,
Private Circulation; Bible of Francis Fulton now held by Clarence Fulton; Bible
of Sarah Naomi Fulton now held by Freda (Haddad) Dewar; interviews with Murray,
Clarence and Dr. Margaret Fulton, the four daughters of Sarah Naomi Fulton, and
a number of their children; BC Vital Statistics; birth, death and marriage
records of the Haddad family maintained by Leona May (Haddad) Marriott;
personal research of Jean Rebecca (Fulton) Rawluk.
Updated 1 January 2000
.